T. S. ELIOT

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

Home is where one starts from.

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

In my beginning is my end.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

So the lover must struggle for words.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.